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Art in Review; Sophie von Hellermann

'Goddess in the Doorway' Greene Naftali Gallery 526 West 26th Street, Chelsea Through June 18

The beguiling and irritating paintings of Sophie von Hellermann, a young, precociously successful German who lives in London and is having her first New York solo show, look as if they were made by a nerdy high school girl. Working with watery acrylics and large brushes on raw canvases, she paints pale, blurry and dingily colored fantasies having to do with space and time travel and ancient mythology.

Images include a sexy blonde in a little green party dress in a space capsule; two men playing three-dimensional billiards in a green space made with super-wide brush strokes; Einstein playing the violin in the kitchen; and the "Goddess in the Doorway (Creativity)," who, accompanied by a dog, wears a short blue dress and gold-string sandals.

Ms. von Hellermann's staining technique, like watercolor painting, precludes correction, which is why her pictures look sketchy and underfinished, or to a sympathetic eye, fresh and spontaneous. You could say that the fluid technique expresses a mercurial, innocent femininity that dissolves the boundaries between the erotic and the scientific. But the apparent naïveté is underwritten by a web of artistic connections extending from the original stain painter, Helen Frankenthaler, to faux-girlish painters like Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik. It is most impressive, after all, how nimbly Ms. von Hellermann navigates the shallows of contemporary fashion and sensibility. KEN JOHNSON